#11 A Sentimental Journey
Book Five. Turkey. Section 1. Yilmaz Güney. Arkadaş.
With fifty dollars, Tristram arrived in Istanbul via Cyprus. He meets his travelling companion in the hotel foyer, a scrawny middle-aged eccentric from the North of England wearing shorts, khaki shirt and short-brimmed Panama hat, holding an olive-green canvas tote bag containing his travel diary completed every evening in miniscule script and the rest of his spartan possessions. They leave Istanbul the same day, hitching down the west coast to Izmir, on to Selçuk where they visit the Hellenic theatre at Ephesus, and then head eastwards, hitching a ride from a German in a light blue, tie-dyed tee-shirt, driving a Mercedes from West Berlin along the northern hippie trail to be sold in Afghanistan. They arrive at Denizli, where they visit the pale blue salt pools and white encrusted hills at Pamukalle. They hitch southwards towards Antalya and visit the roman amphitheatre at Aspendos near the town of Serik. They spend the night camping on a headland above a deserted rocky beach watching the setting sun. A local youth returns Tristram’s rudimentary belongings, a kodak camera and unwashed clothing, stolen during the night. He had slept with his passport and travellers’ cheques in a money belt.
They continue eastwards along the Mediterranean coast but their route is barred at Silifke, following the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus launched from the port of Mersin on 20 July. From 25 January to 17 November 1974, Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006), leader of the Republican People’s party, was prime minister in an unstable coalition with the Islamist National Salvation party led by Necmettin Erbakan (1926-2011). On 15 July 1974, the National Guard in Cyprus overthrew President Archbishop Makarios III (1913-1977) and replaced him with Nikos Sampson (1935-2001) as de facto President, a puppet of the Greek Military Junta. On 20 July, Ecevit authorised Turkish military intervention, referred to as Attila I, on the side of the Turkish minority in Cyprus, which led to heavy fighting between Turkish forces and the Cypriot National Guard, covertly supported by Greek forces. A first cease-fire to facilitate peace negotiations in Geneva ended on the fourteenth August with a renewed Turkish offensive, known as Attila II, which resulted in Turkish occupation of the Northern part of Cyprus.
As troops left southern Turkey for the operation, “Turks reacted with delight rather than alarm at the sight of war preparations. People cheered as ships, carrying equipment obviously designed for amphibious operations, gathered in the Turkish port of Mersin.” The frenzy of popular support for the military action was described in the American press in the following manner: “… men and women along the highway cheered the troops, blowing kisses and handing slices of watermelon to the soldiers whenever the convoys stopped. … Nearly all shops and many homes were displaying Turkey’s flag, red with a crescent and star. This show of patriotic fervour was matched by radio messages urging Turkish mothers to be proud that their sons were at war. Cafes were crowded with men discussing the battle reports printed in newspapers under headlines proclaiming, ‘Victory, Victory!’” (Adamson 289)
Tristram witnesses patriotic fervour and adulation of Ecevit at every small restaurant where they stop for cheap, nourishing dishes, with a selection of köfte, menemen, imam bayildi, and biber dolmasi, served with plain rice from simple metal containers. Barred from travelling further along the southern coast, Tristram and his companion head northwards across the Anatolian plain. After visiting the Mevlâna museum in Konya, spiritual home of the whirling dervishes, they visit the cone-shaped rock formations at Kayseri and the cave churches near Göreme.
Hitching to Aksaray, on a desolate road through an arid landscape of low-lying hills and Anatolian villages with mounds of yellow hay in front of recently built rose roofed houses, a caravan of cars and vans sweep into view. The Mercedes leading the procession stops and the driver invites them into the back seat. His name is Yilmaz Güney, born Yilmaz Pütün on 1 September 1937 in Yenice, in the district of Karabük in the province of Adana. His father, a Zaza, was from the Kurdish village of Sivérek in the South-East of Turkey. His mother was a Kurd from the village of Muþ, near Lake Van. Güney started in the film industry as an assistant to the legendary director Atíf Yilmaz (1925-2006) and went on to have a highly successful career as an actor in popular films throughout the 1960s, becoming known as the “Ugly King.”
The 1960s are considered as the Golden Years of Turkish cinema. Colour films began in 1963 and dominated the market by 1967. In 1966, with 241 films, Turkish cinema was the fourth in the feature film production worldwide. During this period, a new kind of cinema emerged influenced by the social and political atmosphere of the country after the coup d’état of 27 May 1960 and the establishment of a progressive constitution in 1961, which brought a more relaxed atmosphere that nourished arts. Translations of diverse ideologies, including Marxism-Leninism, became available. With the steady development of industrialization and the growing national awareness in the so-called Third World, of which Turkey was a part, a certain euphoria for the arrival of a socialist revolution was felt, which was reflected in the films of the 1960s-70s, with Yilmaz Güney in Turkey, Ousmane Sembene in Senegal and Fernando Solanes in Argentina, for example, as pioneers. (Dönmez-Colin 5)
In 1970, Güney founded his own film production company, Güney Films, which produced over twenty films, notably Umut (Hope) (1970) which was screened at the 23rd Cannes film festival but banned in Turkey until 1995.
Yilmaz Güney represents a breaking point between the popular cinema and political cinema in Turkey. His stories, characters and themes reflect the political ‘angst’ of the 1970s. He also has a unique place in Turkish cinema as the unattractive lead. The characters he portrayed were people on the margins: unemployed, poor vagabonds. Güney portrayed these lonely anti-heroes who resisted the capitalist system in Turkey through their hanging on to life. In creating these heroes Güney leaned on the Turkish popular folk tales and their rebel hero, the urban lumpen proletariat, as a loser character with a specific body language and a peculiar vocabulary. In his later films, Güney’s lumpen characters took on a darker political tone. They were no longer lonely Robin Hoods in the slums, the members of the lumpen proletariat who stole from the rich to give back to the poor. They were now rebels who fall victim to both the conservative traditions of society and state oppression during the military coup between 1980-1983. (Akser 144)
In 1972, Güney was sentenced to seven years in prison for sedition. During a brief period of liberty following his release from prison in May 1974, under a general amnesty for political prisoners granted by President Ecevit, Güney started filming Arkadaş in the summer of 1974. In September 1974, he was arrested on the charge of killing a local judge, Sefa Mutlu, who had insulted Güney and members of the film crew, including Güney’s wife Fatoş, in a restaurant in the town of Adana while on location for Endişe (Anxiety). From that time on, Güney was held in prison until his escape in 1981. While in prison, Güney continued to write scripts and co-direct, in collaboration notably with the director Zeki Ӧkten (1941-2009), on Sürü (The Herd) (1979) and Düşman (The Enemy) (1979), and with Serif Gören (b.1944) on Yol (The Road) (1982). On 12 September 1980, the Turkish military seized power from the civilian government led by Süleyman Demirel (1924-2015) and in 1981 Güney’s prison sentence was increased to over 100 years. Echoing the storyline in Yol, Güney in October 1981 fled by boat to Greece while on a temporary release from jail during Bayram, a Muslim religious holiday, and, after completing the edit of Yol in Switzerland, was granted asylum by President Mitterrand, who had been elected President on 21 May 1981. In France, Güney made his final film Duvar (The Wall) (1983). He died of stomach cancer on 9 September 1984 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Yilmaz Güney was a rare artist who could blend political messages with commercially successful populist films. His Umut /The Hope (1970), extolled by the intellectuals of the cinematheque, is considered a turning point in Turkish cinema. Sürü / The Herd (1978), scripted by Güney while in prison and directed by Zeki Ӧkten, foregrounding the tragic story of the disintegration of a nomad family, is one of the best films of Turkish cinema. Yol / The Way (Şerif Gören, 1982), also scripted by Güney, shared the Palme d’or with Missing (Costa Gavras) at the Cannes film Festival, 1983. (Dönmez-Colin 6)
Güney invites Tristram and his companion to stay at a hotel near the location for the village scenes in Arkadaş, and to participate in a celebratory dinner that evening. The first part of Arkadaş is shot in Istanbul and the surrounding beach town of Bayramoğlu.
Arkadaş, meaning ‘friend’ but also ‘comrade’ in the parlance of the period, is an odd entry in Güney’s oeuvre. Structured as a ‘rich girl-poor boy in love film’, it is Güney‘s attempt to engage in class difference while staying true to one’s commitments. It takes place in Bayramoğlu, a then up-and-coming resort towards the Asian end of Istanbul (Kumburgaz had the same attraction on the European end; both places had long lost their appeal). The scene in question, however, is not in Bayramoğlu but comes after a series of ethnographic shots of bourgeois decadence on the beach. In this scene, taking place in Çicek Pasaji (Flower Passage), Azem, played by Güney himself, meets his old college friend Cemil (Kerim Afşar) for the first time in the film. Again, as if writing an ethnography, Güney documents the folksy quality of life in this celebrated drinking hole: beer in tall glasses, fried mussels, kokoreç (grilled intestines), accordion player Madam Anahit, drinkers and passers-by. In the 1970s, Çicek Pasaji was packed with students, intellectuals and after-work crowds, as it was the place-to-be for a conversation over beer. Built as ‘Cite de Pera’ in the 1870s, the likes of which are to be found in Milan and Paris, Çicek Pasaji is no longer a living venue but a renovated place, adorned with hanging flower pots and framed pictures of its celebrities, including the late Madam Anahit. As the neighbouring fish market has retreated under the attack of gift shops selling cheap traditions, the passage lost its crowd to the nearby Nevizade Street. After leaving Çicek Pasaji, Güney’s camera lingers in yet another locale erased from Istanbul’s cityscape, Sulukule, the lowbrow entertainment district, now marked for gentrification. “Arkadaş” reads like a dated ethnography of times and places gone by. (Soysal 28)
The second geographic location for Arkadaş is an Anatolian village in the district of Aksaray where Azem and Celim grew up.
Güney plays Azem, a public worker who comes to visit his prosperous childhood friend Cemil (Kerim Asfar) amid the decadent tranquillity of an upper middle-class summer tourist village. The militant, class-conscious Azem is angered by what he perceives as Cemil’s selling out of his youthful activism and small-town-roots. He finds himself at odds with Cemil’s petit-bourgeois wife, and begins to try to indoctrinate the youth of the village into the class struggle. The film’s idyllic, relatively conventional narrative style then gives way to a stylistically splintered, elliptical second half, much of it set among the rural poor, as Azem takes Cemil back to their village, where Cemil begins to see the error of his ways and becomes increasingly suicidal. (Ebiri)
The choice of a bourgeois milieu as the principal setting in Arkadaş was exceptional for Güney, and perhaps explains its muted critical reception.
Güney has never been known for his subtlety, but his indulgences are usually tempered by moments of surprising insight and tenderness, particularly in those films set among the rural Anatolian poor. The Friend’s bourgeois setting thus becomes a liability for the director, as he allows the film to devolve into caricature. It is not without its moments of beauty or mystery - Güney the actor’s gaze is characteristically hypnotic, and he gives one of his most complex performances here – but it is far from the masterpiece some anticipated. (Ebiri)
Illustration by Danny Hellman.
An audio version of this post recorded by the author will be published on substack as a podcast on Sunday 11 May.